THE moralists of olden times used to argue whether gratitude was or was not to be numbered among the duties and the virtues. Now such discussions are at an end; not because the question has been settled, but because interest in ethical problems has diminished with the decline of the religious spirit and has not been able to find as yet an adequate practical substitute in the cultivation of philosophy. This weakening may be perceived especially in the forms of culture most remote from their religious origins, the intellectual cultures, namely. There we find no trace of sensitiveness to those delicate “moral scruples” which are to ethics what refinement of taste is to art and to the philosophy of art.

However, looking through the old treatises on morals and following the classifications and the arguments that are there debated as to gratias agere, gratias habere, and gratias referre, people, it seems to me, ought readily to agree that the concept of “gratitude” is a concept not of ethics but of law.

To support this conclusion, or at least to suggest it, the very definition of “gratitude” should suffice—if gratitude be the duty devolving upon an individual to repay with benefit the benefit received from another individual. Ethically speaking, nothing good is ever done to the advantage of an individual as an individual, but only to the advantage of the universal order to which benefactor and recipient are alike subject; and the obligations arising from a favour received, like those accompanying a favour done, are obligations toward that order and not toward any person.

But in the juridical field we immediately encounter the particular type of relationship in which the concept of gratitude has a natural place: wherever there is an exchange of economic values, wherever there is a contract expressed or implied, wherever there is a case of do ut des. From such presuppositions come the bonds between patron and client, between overlord and vassal, between captain and soldier, and so on down to the loyalties of secret societies, robber bands, and criminal conspiracies in general. The notion of gratitude to the person is so clearly established in law that the modern Italian civil code, of Napoleonic and Roman origins, permits the revocation of a gift if the recipient prove ungrateful.

Now all this is foreign to the ethical field. The well-balanced man feels an actual repugnance, not only for demanding gratitude but even for desiring it. The return of a favour he interprets as something not really his due, and to accept it seems to imply a subservience of man to man which he is loath to recognise. Nor is this all. The true gentleman feels a certain indelicacy in the attempt to balance one’s debt to a benefactor. As an old French moralist pointed out, haste to repay a favour received is a sort of ungratefulness in itself. It suggests failure to appreciate the subtler values of a courtesy, and tends to interpret the latter as a mere affair of give and take, lowering it therefore to the economic or legal plane. Indeed it is ethically necessary at times to meet a favour with apparent ingratitude, announcing, as an Austrian official once did in connection with help his country had received from Russia, that we will “dazzle the world with the magnitude of our ungratefulness.” There are cases, to be sure, where one may legitimately level the reproach of ingratitude against one who has received a kindness; but in such cases the sinner’s behaviour must be unjust and immoral in itself, betraying vulgarity and meanness of disposition and showing that the kindness done has been either vain or harmful, that, in a word, it has not served the universal order. If a person would repay a benefactor morally and without offence, he can only show himself worthy of the benefactor’s moral approval—and the approval will fall not upon him, the individual, but upon the moral consciousness which is greater than himself. In an extreme and tragic case this might require his actually taking up arms against his benefactor.

But to recognise the juridical character of the obligation to be grateful is not to deprive the concept of value either in its own peculiar field or in respect of morality. The economic life and the moral life do not stand toward each other as co-ordinate independent spheres: there is perpetual and continuous intercourse between them. The economic or juridical virtues are presuppositions of the moral virtues and are the first steps towards attaining these. This fact explains the importance we attach to gratitude, loyalty, fidelity, though these arise and persist from considerations of utility. Gratitude represents the surrender of a narrow and transitory good in favour of a higher and more permanent one. It is at least a transcension of the immediate impulse by an exercise of will; and strength of will is a prerequisite of moral will. The thief who cannot be a loyal thief will not make an honest man even if he leaves off stealing. A man who cannot live up to his juridical obligations is not prepared to meet his moral obligations. Being an economic virtue, gratitude appears under its moral aspect as a non-absolute awaiting further development. But it is far from being a negligible thing: for the man who does his duty for selfish motives is still in advance of the man who cannot be consistent even in his selfishness.

Likewise juridical rather than ethical by nature is the concept of “merit,” which differs from the notion of “gratitude” in that it relates to a service performed over and above legal obligation and to the advantage not so much of an individual as of a more or less extensive group. Society indeed has invented various systems of recognition and recompense to promote the creation of “merits” by an appeal to utilitarian impulses—and not infrequently to petty vanity or farsighted self-seeking. There are people whom we can never keep usefully active unless we dangle before their eyes some such glittering object as a cross of knighthood. And a canny social organism will therefore establish official orders and acknowledgments of “merit.” These will always provoke the mirth of the moralist, but they will have the wholesome respect of the practical man who cannot fail to see the tangible fruits they bear, the profits they earn, the bacon they bring home.

But a system of ethics cannot pretend to have freed itself entirely of utilitarian ideas so long as it continues to define virtuous actions as “meritorious” in contradistinction to “duties” considered as obligatory; for the concept of “merit” will always preserve a trace at least of a credit which the individual takes to himself as an individual apart from the universal order—a trace of selfish interest, that is. The truth is that in acting ethically, even, let us say, in performing an act that attains the supreme heights of heroism, we are doing what we can do and what, inasmuch as we can, we ought to do. There is, consequently, no “merit” in our action. Hence the modesty of truly noble men, their fear and trembling as they confront the crisis, the little time they spend in self-congratulation over the feat accomplished; because if what they did was well done, by that very fact it was such that the individual was swallowed up and lost in it, obeying its sheer necessity.

This consideration, however, does not validate a judgment only too often put forward by the lazy and the vicious. There is no credit, they say, in doing good or great things since those who do them follow their own nature, interest, or pleasure. Others do differently only because they have different natures, different interests, different pleasures, and therefore submit to a different compulsion.

The conclusion is beside the point; for though it seems to state a self-evident and incontestable fact, those who draw it do not observe, or at least pretend not to observe, that it really has no bearing on the denial of “merit” as a legitimate ethical concept which I have just made. What this excuse denies is the difference between pleasure and duty, between action to the advantage of an individual and superindividual action. Its denial of “merit” is a mere pretext, a mere cloak, for a denial of morality; and an attempt to utilise the determinism of a formula—trahit sua quemque voluptas—to identify morality with convenience or caprice. It is a salve for guilty consciences in people who would enjoy the peace of mind that virtue brings with full liberty meantime to indulge their whims and vices.